


The monsters all howled at the morning spreadsheet

by bloodscout



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:14:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25623481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodscout/pseuds/bloodscout
Summary: Rosie as an Avatar of four different entities.The End / The Web / The Desolation / The Vast
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11
Collections: TMA Girls Week, WLW Writing TMA Women





	1. The End

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "Avatar AU" day of TMA Girls Week  
> Fic title from "We've Got A Lot To Teach You, Cassius Green" by The Coup

The End is patient. It is happy to wait it’s turn. All things come to an end, and The End came to all things. It bided its time, content to wait until the hour struck when it would take its dues.

The End, however, did not abide by cheating. It was not a pushover. It was not driven by something as base as hunger, nor something as ephemeral as desire. No, The End maintained order, and disrupting order was something that had to be rectified. You could evade The End for a time, but there came a time when the rope grew taut, and it was time to tie the noose.

“How are you this morning, Elias?” Rosie greeted cheerily. “You look positively ashen, have you drunk enough virgin blood today?”

“Good morning, Rosie. As ever, I adore your professionalism.” Elias said, his aloofness a thin façade. How closely he tied life with youth. How foolishly.

“You’re expecting Mr. Fairchild today.” she informed him. “11 o’clock. I’ll buzz him in to your office.”

Elias swept out of the room without further acknowledgement.

A number of people within the halls of the Magnus Institute were actively running from The End. There were a smaller few who had been running for too long.

It was a surprisingly quiet morning as Rosie waited for Simon Fairchild arrive. She whiled away a few minutes playing a variety of colourful mobile games. She was flicking through Pinterest pages for recipes for the next union meeting when Basira Hussain made her way inside.

“Hello, Ms. Hussain. Keeping busy?”

Basira paused, her hand resting for a moment on the edge of Rosie’s desk. Rosie patted her arm comfortingly. She had quite the affection for Basira. She had been one of the officers that killed Rayner, eliminating a particularly persistent thorn in Rosie’s side by doing so.

Basira only sighed. “A day at a time.”

Rosie smiled sympathetically and reached into her top drawer. She folded a sherbet lemon into Basira’s palm.

“Stay safe, pet.” she said, with a gentle pat. “It’ll all be all right in the end.”

Basira’s answering smile almost reached her eyes, and she waved before making her way down to the basement.

It was not long after that that Simon Fairchild arrived, and when she announced his arrival over the intercom, Elias requested she call Peter Lukas to join them.

Rosie dialled the number of Peter Lukas. He hung up immediately. She dialled a second time. He hung up once again. Those Lonely types were so infuriating. Much too mopey. She masked her caller ID and called once again. This time, he picked up.

“Good morning, Mr. Lukas.” she chirped. “It’s Rosie calling, from The Magnus Institute.”

“Oh,” Peter sighed in lieu of a greeting, which Rosie thought was rather rude. “I thought you might have been a telemarketer.”

“Just me, Mr. Lukas.” she informed, faux cheery. “I’m just calling to say that Mr. Bouchard has the afternoon free. He hasn’t requested you,” He had, of course, but it was best that Peter didn’t know that. “But I thought it wise to inform you that he was free if you wanted to set up a meeting.”

Evidently deciding that he had heard another person’s voice for long enough, Peter chose that moment to hang up. The nerve of that man, honestly! Rosie counted her breaths in and out like Melanie King had shown her the other day, and awaited Peter to confirm his appointment via text.

It was important for the End of maintain order. It was important for the End to be remembered. And it had found a lovely little place to do that. Rosie write Peter Lukas’ appointment into her day book, and added another stroke next to his name.


	2. The Web

As the receptionist, Rosie signed for every package. She made every appointment, greeted every guest, and handpicked every job application. Of course, Elias technically ran the institute, and he saw everything that happened within its walls, but he did not control it like she did. They were frustratingly sedentary, Watcher types. Rosie thought that calling Elias the Director of the institute was more than a little insulting.

She was particularly enjoying the new Archivist. The Web already had a mark on him before he even began, and she liked to think of appointing him as her own little Christmas bonus. He was such fun to run circles around, to push one way and then the other. Not to mention that he had assistants with him, which gave Rosie that many more bodies to work with. So insistent on having people around him, but so reliable in never telling them enough to clue them in to what was going on. That was something she appreciated about the Eye — once it knew something, it had no interest in sharing that information around.

One of Rosie’s first actions when she started at The Magnus Institute was to introduce a company-wide gift exchange over the holidays. She had conceived of it as her first large scale operation, a test to see how well she could bind and manipulate so many people. Elias had approved it immediately, always wanting to peek into other people’s presents like a troublesome child at a birthday party.

This year, Rosie had drawn the Archivist as her holiday partner. Jon had sent many an irate email to Elias about the required participation, swinging between threatening a religious discrimination lawsuit and barricading himself in the staff cafeteria when they next had chocolate cake. Rosie made sure all of those emails failed to reach Elias, and cancelled their contract with the cake supplier for good measure. It was only pettiness if it didn’t serve a larger plan.

Besides, Jon was going to love her present. She pulled her knitting needles out of her handbag, and got to work.


	3. The Desolation

A great deal of pain came through The Magnus Institute. The people who came through their doors to make a statement were having the worst day of their lives, having experienced unimaginable horrors. It was not in Rosie’s interest to know what had happened. The sloppy seconds of their horror held no appeal. No, Rosie simply waited for a very specific set of words.

“I’ll just call down and tell the Archivist that you want to make a statement.” she informed the young woman on the other side of the desk. “Have a seat, pet. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“Thank you.” The woman’s lip trembled as she spoke, her eyes shiny with unspilled tears. “I just can’t see how this day can get any worse.”

Ah, yes. There it was.

Rosie had a lovely little plan for this one. She would call extension to the Archives, pretend that they were polite enough to answer her, and go to make a cup of tea for the poor dear. Rosie would accidentally pour the hot water over the woman's lap, and watch her grit her teeth through the burning of her skin. She would stay, of course, anxious to give her statement. Rosie would apologise, and make another cup of tea, and then the statement giver would burn her tongue just when she thought it was cool enough to drink. She would go to make her statement, and stand from the chair with a shooting pain ripping through her back. She would get a stinging paper cut from the consent form. Her fingertips buzzed with the possibility.

It inspired a lot of creativity, making someone’s worst day ever just that bit worse. Rosie liked to think she was rather good at it.


	4. The Vast

The Vast had a lot to thank paperwork for. It was not so interested in the winding, infuriating, obfuscated bureaucracy of it all — that was more the domain of the Spiral. No, the Vast revelled in the way it was never ending, the countless number of forms you would read and sign and read and sign until you died.

Paperwork also meant statistics. Dissecting the human experiences into numbers and percentages, quantifying you down and down and down until you were just a data point amongst millions of others just like you. It was delicious.

It was Rosie’s job to do most of the paperwork. She kept up with KPIs and profit margins and employee demographics. It was an unusual job to fall to the receptionist, but the Magnus institute was neither a traditional workplace, nor in possession of a competent director. Rosie thought if she showed Elias the equations she had running through her Excel spreadsheet, he might explode. Maybe she should try, though. She did so love watch people try to comprehend things so far beyond their understanding.

Her elongated nails clacked away at her keyboard as she calculated the performance review for the Research department. She didn’t include a number with anything less than six decimal places. She could barely wait to send the reports out, so excited to taste those employees realisation of the spiralling, overwhelming insignificance of their life’s work. She sated herself by sending a request to Artefact Storage to fill out their inventory in triplicate. The rush was immediate, like someone had pulled the floor out from under her and left her in a state of exhilarating freefall.

Truely, paperwork was such a beautiful thing.

**Author's Note:**

> pls come yell at me about the magnus archives on tumblr at [sansculotted](sansculotted.tumblr.com)


End file.
